Sixers - Raptors Game Five: Oh Dear God Not This

Wow, this was... awful. I mean, Game Seven against Atlanta level of awful. Like, quit Twitter levels of awful. (Most of that was Elon Musk, but still.)

> I don't know what happened to Joel Embiid, but his game was completely missing tonight. You could always count on this man to care on defense, but tonight, the Raps just drove right at him and scored, over and over again. This would have been a bad game in December; in April, it's inexcusable. Maybe he's just mailing it in because he knows he's not getting past the next round with this thumb and this roster, but for heaven's sake, dude... losing a 3-0 lead in the first round is not going to wash away.

> Short of Carson Wentz and Ben Simmons, I can't remember a local athlete that went from beloved to what the living hell faster than Matisse Thybulle. From the moment the vaccination news came out, his game went into the toilet, and when you don't have that much margin for error in the first place from a miniscule offensive game, he's just unplayable. I don't know how you get him back.

> You'd think that losing Fred van Vliet would hurt the Raptors, but man alive, you would be wrong. Now that everyone on the court is supersized and no one is a defensive liability, the Sixer guards aren't getting separation, and the first two games are a distant memory. Toronto may be better off without him, at least in this series.

> When your two best players are Tobias Harris and Danny Green, you aren't winning a goddamn thing, people. At this point, despite having two shots to get out of this series, I don't think the Sixers will. They'd be the first team in NBA history to lose from 3-0, and yeah, you pretty much blow up the organization at that point. The least you do is fire Doc Rivers into the sun and blame the whole thing on Embiid's thumb, but the bench is also a tire fire and every other thing, really.

> Doc Rivers had no answers tonight, and I get that it's not fair to put this on the coach, but... he rode his starters like a drowning man tonight, even when it was plainly obvious they weren't doing anything to deserve the faith. If there was ever a time to crash paddle a team with an all bench lineup two minutes into a game, this was it. 

> You can't miss every three for something like two-plus quarters in an NBA game at home. You just can't.

> I don't have anything else to say about this abomination, and a team that hasn't lead in regulation in the last three games. What a nightmare.